AMD Confirms Addition of Three-Core Phenom Chips

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SAN FRANCISCOAdvanced Micro Devices is adding a triple-core Phenom processor to its roadmap, AMD executives said Monday, selling processors that it would otherwise throw onto the scrap heap.

The chips will actually be a four-core Phenom with one core disabled, according to AMD representatives. It will be released during the first quarter of 2008, following the Phenom’s launch this December, at an undetermined price.

AMD made the disclosures as part of a roadmap update that the company simultaneously provided to its customers and journalists alike, which added the “Toliman” triple-core chip in 2008, a second “Heka” triple-core chip in 2009, plus a next-generation “Regor” dual-core chip in 2009 as well. AMD’s plans for its 65-nm “Stars” cores are now essentially public. The announcement was also timed to steal a bit of thunder from the Intel Developer Forum, taking place here this week.What does this the additional three-core Phenom mean? Potentially additional confusion for enthusiasts wanting to calculate the exact divisions of price and performance between AMD’s various chips.

For consumers, however, it may create another mid-range value tier so that the distinctions between a high-end Phenom and a low-end single-core Athlon 64 aren’t so great. Between Intel and AMD combined, the price disparity between a 3.0-GHz Intel quad-core QX6850 ($999) and a low-end single-core Athlon 64 3200+ ($48) is almost $1,000, noted Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced desktop marketing for AMD.

“If AMD is going to charge $400 to $500 for a quad-core chip, $200 for a single-core chip, they can charge $300 for a triple core it’s free money” assuming that the chips would otherwise be thrown out, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight64.

Several key questions still remain to be answered, aside from the pricing of the new chip. For one thing, there will be the branding: the rumored “Phenom X2” designation will most likely not be used; the product simply will be known as a three- or triple-core Phenom microprocessor, Moorhead said privately after a Monday briefing with reporters. AMD uses a four-digit model number to indicate the processor generation, the number of cores, and the relative performance of the chip.

And that means a further blurring between high-speed dual-core chips, slower quad-core chips, and an intermediate triple-core chip. “One thing I’ll tell you there will absolutely be dual-core processors priced lower than triple core, and absolutely be quad-core processors priced higher than triple-core,” added Bob Brewer, corporate vice president of marketing and strategy for AMD’s desktop division. He said that consumers would gravitate to the message that “N+1 is greater than N”, where N is the number of cores.

“Triple provides a better intermediate step,” Brewer added.

Executives said that there would be no technical issues with running three cores, rather than two, four, or eight.

“Microsoft is excited to see AMD creating new technologies like the AMD Phenom triple-core processors,” said Bill Mitchell, corporate vice president of the Windows Hardware Ecosystem at Microsoft, in a statement. “We see potential for power and performance improvements through triple-core processing in the industry and are exploring with AMD the possibility of taking advantage of this in the Microsoft family of products.”

According to Moorhead, the decision to add the three-core Phenom to the roadmap was driven by pricing as well as market demand. He said that Mercury Research market research for the second quarter of 2007 showed that less than two percent of all processors sold used four cores, an indication that the market simply wasn’t ready for the transition.

And the additional three-core chip also made smart business sense, AMD executives explained: if one of the four cores failed to achieve its rated speed, the company would either have to clock the entire chip down or simply discard the part. In what an AMD spokesman called a hypothetical example, AMD could launch a 2.8-GHz tri-core Phenom as well as a 2.6-GHz quad-core chip. AMD will continue to use model numbers to indicate relative performance, he added.

It made more business sense to design a quad-core architecture where one of the cores could be turned off versus a discrete tri-core product design, Brewer said. “This was about product management,” not yields, he said.

Moorhead also talked up two forthcoming chipsets: the RS780, due in the first quarter of 2008, as well as the “Spider” platform, slated for a fourth-quarter 2007 release.

The RS780 will be the company’s first integrated DirectX 10 chipset, adding “awesome” 3D performance, Moorhead said. He declined to share specific benchmarks. The chipset will include HyperTransport 3 as well as PCI Express Gen 2. UVD, a technology to accelerate Blu-ray and HD DVD discs in hardware will also be included, while the notebook version of the chipset will include AMD’s Hyper Flash, essentially a “ReadyBoost” flash cache to modestly accelerate boot and resume times.

Moorhead said little about the “Spider” platform, except for the fact that it would launch before the end of the year in conjunction with new ATI graphics chips. Of note will be a “Tweaker’s Delight” software utility, which Moorhead likened to a 747 cockpit, with support for numerous hardware tweaks.

In 2008, AMD plans to release the “Deneb FX,” the “Deneb,” and the “Propus” quad-core parts during the second half of the year for enthusiast platforms. Both “Deneb” cores will use a shared level-3 cache, while the “Propus” will not. AMD’s first triple-core “Toliman” part will be released in the first half of 2008, along with the dual-core “Kuma” chip.

The roadmap update did not include the first AMD “Fusion” chips, which will combine graphics and a processor on the same die and are due in 2009. However, the first chips in that line will be designed for notebook PCs, as AMD has said previously.

“The first product from AMD’s family of accelerated processors combining CPU and GPU capabilities, code-named ‘Falcon’, is expected in 2009,” an AMD spokeswoman said via email. “Optimized for notebook computers, the ‘Falcon’ family will feature up to four CPU cores with an integrated, unified shading architecture and DirectX GPU core for enhanced graphics processing. ‘Falcon’ will be a part of AMD’s ‘Eagle’ platform for notebook computing.”

It is unknown whether AMD will add a triple-core processor to its mobile roadmap. Simon Solotko, a brand manager for AMD’s desktop group, declined to comment when asked. But Mike Goddard, senior director of performance computing at AMD, said the addition of a tri-core mobile chip was a possibility. One of AMD’s goals is to keep its latest generation of microprocessor cores within the power constraints of the prior generation, which disabling a core helps achieve.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story misspelled Solotko’s name.

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